Fall Reading Quilt

In addition to quilting and watching the kids, I spend a good amount of time reading.  It's been a favorite hobby of mine since I was a kid.  I really love books.  If you need a good book to read,  "Wonder" by RJ Palacio is one of my absolute favorites.  Currently I'm reading "Ordinary Grace" by William Kent Krueger.  It's a sad one.  Very good, but sad.

So of course I like random stacked coin quilts because they remind me of stacks of books.  I decided I'd better make one myself.  I used the instructions in Block Party, a book featuring several improv projects.  It was fun to just be able to cut the "books" to whatever size I wanted, but I did find that a lot more trimming was required and time consuming.  I ended up putting a corduroy "shelf" at the bottom of the columns.  I like it.  I bound it with Corduroy too.  Like the black corduroy in my last project, the brown is also a lint magnet.  But since it's hanging on the wall it probably won't be too bad.

Points I pondered while making this quilt:

• Improv style means that you might ran out of background fabric.  Drat!  I wanted to the columns to be uneven stacks.  I used up all my background fabric, and then I squared up the quilt ended up trimming off much of the background on the left side.   
• A crooked quilt is more obvious when hanging on a wall.  I think that crooked edge might bother me every time I walk down the stairs.  Maybe I can create some diversion by adding some more decor to the shelf.  :)  I will have to look into more tips on squaring up quilts.
• I am planning on creating a quilt for each season for this particular wall, so I found a quilt hanging method that will make it easy to remove/reinstall the quilts.  I found this method on Craftsy which uses corner hanging pockets, a yardstick, and 3M Command picture hanging strips.  It was easy and looks pretty good.  The one problem was that the middle of the quilt still sagged away from the wall.  I fixed this by simple adding some special double stick tape (Hollywood Secrets Fashion Tape) to the top of the quilt and sticking it to the yardstick.  The tape is made especially for clothing, I use it often for my high fashion wardrobe (ha. ha.) and have never had a problem with it leaving residue, so I think it should be fine on the quilt.

So enough of the quilt details.  Thanks for letting me talk it all out.  It helps me kind of cement things in my brain and remember what I can do differently on future quilts.  I am linking to Quilt Story's Fabric Tuesday and Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation.

On a completely different note -- Brian and I went to an Elton John concert last night.  It has been many years since I've been to a concert of this scale.  We actually won the tickets from a newspaper contest.  So that was pretty exciting.  The traffic was horrendous (1 hour to go 2 miles) and put a damper on the evening for us.  We had fun, but I'm not a crowd person and frankly, I'm just kinda boring.  We watched the energetic folks in front of us dance the night away -- and there we sat tapping our feet to the beat, bopping our heads a bit, and both wearing earplugs to muffle the high volume.  ha.  We are awesome. ;)  Anyway, the music was fun, and Elton John apparently isn't getting older like us -- at age 67 he sounded great!